@freemo Your reasonable argument for translation of non-English posts is sufficient, compelling.
.
I'm persuaded to vote "yes" because of two quite different reasons which need to be made explicit.
.
A. The motto and core functon of QOTO is very clear:

QOTO = Question Others to Teach Ourselves?

If a post is in a language I can't understand, the explicit purpose and/or function of this Mastodon instance is thwarted. That's not good.

B. The function of a social media website is communication, but that important opportunity is frustrated, for example, if a post is in Telugu.

If someone post anything at all in Telugu, the words are understood only those who can read this Dravidian language.
.
Does this mean someone should infer that I'm "anti-Telugu"? No, not at all, who's kidding who?
.
RESTATEMENT/BOTTOM LINE: I'd like to see another vote on a related but more general topic: Should we make a rule which mitigates solipsism because of the unintended consequences?
.
Going forward, we learn lessons the hard way, right?
.
We can do better, right?
.
QOTO = Question Others to Teach Ourselves?

@freemo >tfw people start annexing photos of their posts written on a piece of paper

@freemo Just realized, is this because of the new influx of indian posters? If so, then know that most of them are bots. They are popping up on all instances. Comment something on their posts and see if the response makes any sense.

India recently blocked twitter so a lot of people are comming to the fediverse. Which includes advertising and data mining networks that have to rebuild their bot netoworks.

Most or all followers of those "people" should be similar accounts.

@freemo

My thoughts on the matter, having read and considered the existing discussion but not replying to any particular part of it:

Enlisting a new mod for every language spoken here doesn't make sense. A monolingual server with five mods and a thousand users is very different from a server with five languages, each with two hundred users and one mod - each language may have a different rate of abuse, mods can't pick up one another's slack when they go on vacation, etc. Moreover, evaluating a foreign-language candidate's suitability is unlikely to be better than guesswork, and rogue mods can cause a lot of damage very quickly. I do not think you will find this an effective solution.

You might reason something like the following:
1. In order that other servers need not block us to avoid being spammed, and to improve the experience of our own users, all content posted here is moderated.
2. As discussed above, content in languages other than English cannot be practicably moderated here.
3. Therefore, the set of content posted here (which, by statement 1, *is* guaranteed moderated) must be disjoint from the set of content in languages other than English (which, by statement 2, *cannot be* guaranteed moderated).

Ergo, content posted here must be in English.

If you think that user-submitted translations on the honour system are suffucient to make content locally moderatable, you can amend statements 2 and 3 accordingly - but I tend to think that you shouldn't consider such posts actively moderated, because you rely on user reports to find out that someone's cheating.

The appropriate solution is *not* for QOTO to try to bodge together a Swiss-army-knife mod team that can moderate any content, but for users who post content that QOTO cannot moderate to use another server that can (or recruit their own moderators and start their own). Then we federate with them and everyone is happy.